Portal Prelude
by Coastaric
Summary: What can be said of Chell's ambiguous beginnings? How did she end up in a stasis pod in the bowls of the laboratory? Describes Chell's early life and the events that led up to her awakening years later. Oneshot.


A low, melodious hum filled a dimly lit room, where unseen sensors and small machines clicked inobtrusively in the metal walls. Under a yellow sodium desk lamp, a girl sat hunched over at a desk with a plate of canned beans and a paper cup filled with milk, which were untouched and pushed to the far side of her workspace.

Chell grew up in the care of the Test Subject Maintenance Staff; although, admittedly, care is a term to be used generously here. Her room was a metal tomb, a defunct long-term relaxation chamber with tiled flooring, where dully colored office equipment from mismatched decades acted as furniture. The young girl suspended a small white pen above some used printer paper. She stared at circular logo and tilted letters along the pen. It read _Aperture Laboratories_. Her eyes returned to the paper.

She could see the reversed words of a test report on the other side, illuminated faintly by the light coming though her glass-topped desk. The most prominent mark was a bold red, menacing stamp splashed aross the reverse side of the report- FAILED. The quiet tune from the walls buzzed in her head as she racked her mind, imploring with herself to fabricate something- anything, really, that she could use for a story. But the words wouldn't come for her. Not the right ones. For this story, she needed warm words, close words, not _objective_, _portal device_, and _propulsion gel_- words used liberally throughout that test report. Setting down her pen, she picked up her fork and carefully stabbed some of the beans, eating them individually off of the fork's four prongs. They were bland, but warm and filling. She chewed thoughtfully as the blank paper stared, yellow light splashed across it.

As far back as her sharp memory could reach, the only education and preoccupation she had ever had was to read the many manuals, test reports, and text books of the lab employees- not very good schoolbooks, and not very entertaining, either. However, when she was lucky, and suceeded in avoiding the most irritable researchers, she was allowed to observe test subjects alongside the staff. She didn't remember ever seeing the man in this report in one of those tests before.

Heaving a heavy sigh, Chell grabbed the pen, determined to finally begin creating this man's life before he came to be on this paper. What he did, where he lived, which radio station was his favorite. Chell only got two on her old radio, and didn't like either. They were both company stations. Flipping the sheet to its printed side, she scanned the test subject's information for the hundreth time. Vitals: Male. 5'9". 180 lbs. Pre Test Results: Highest- Deduction (22nd percentile). Lowest- Spatial Reasoning (7th percentile). Scrawled in an employee's own pen in the designated commentary box was a single note: _Test aborted. Lethal fall caused by improper installation of shock-absorbant knee prostheses. Liable surgeon notified, added to Expl. An. records_.

Chell started as the announcer's robotic, but distincly male voice crackled through the speakers attached to the broken security camera in the highest corner of her room.

"All labs in South Wing closing in ten minutes. Employees, please present verification cards at the emancipation grid and exit in an orderly fasion. Leave all documents, files, equipment, samples, and other Aperture Science property at their designated stations. If you would like to request permisson to pursue research outside of the lab using Aperture Science property, please see the department of..."

Her pen clattered onto the glass as Chell gave one last exasperated sigh, pushed the paper to the corner of her desk, and reluctantly pulled her meal closer. The announcer droned on. An intern would soon be by to collect the plate and cup; and Chell had long accepted the fact that they were all slumped over, miserable beings, irritable and determined to leave her company as soon as possible. She recognized the their disbelief; that they were expected to act as a busboy to some child residing in a nonfuctional South Wing stasis chamber. Sometimes, for entertainment, Chell would clean and hide her fork from them. Most often, they asked her where it really was, a query Chell would answer with a blank stare. The intern would always roll her eyes or shift his weight with annoyance, sigh, and carry her plate and cup out the door without an argument. They didn't want to stay and argue with a clearly unbalanced child. Remembering her prize-worthy collection of dining utensils hidden among the springs of the old armchair in the corner, she felt a quick smile cross her face. She repeated the same technique that night, and once the intern left, Chell changed into her pajamas, which was just a slightly softer, older testing jumpsuit. She climbed into bed and reached for a dental care tablet from the rusting tin on her bedside table. The thin duvet surrounded her as she sunk into the specialized memory foam of the stasis bed, feeling a faint tickle as the nanobots in the tablet cleaned her teeth. Chell decided that if there was one thing in life she loved, it was that bed. Once alseep, she dreamt feverishly of the many tests she'd observed from the lab's plexiglass windows.

As a young child, she was horrified by the dangerous experiments and mutilating trials these deceived people were subjected to. But soon she began to connect the well-wrought successes with the introduction of superior technology in the testchambers; soon began to see that the more meticulously and carefully the data was compiled, the more liberal the researchers's treatment of the subjects seemed to be. With the same dedication she only reserved for writing, she analyzed the methods of these lab rats. Some tried to escape. Some tried to solve it. Some pleaded, some got angry.

When daydreaming, she imagined an animal; a massive sea creature called a whale, which she had seen diagrammed in a report about something called the Borealis. It contained unsolvable test chambers that went undefeated as processions of test subjects paraded through their jaws and disappeared into the fading labyrinth beyond it.

The only information she had been told of her origins, after incessant prying, was that her mother had been a hired test subject desperate for money. Then she had died, leaving Chell behind. This, of course, confused Chell. How did her mother die? What did she look like? What had been her favorite station? And above all, why did Chell remain here? What went undisclosed by the company was that her mother had been desperate enough to apply for the highest paying procedure, involving experimental AI. She had been close to death, lurching between hysteria and demetia after a disastrous brain-mapping trial, when she made a particularly kind-hearted (since-terminated) Aperture test operater vow to find a home for her daughter, whom she claimed, through maddening bouts of pain, had been taken to the Test Subject Child Care center in the main building.

Under normal circumstances, Chell would have been delivered anonymously to a far-enough-away orphanage, as per unofficial company policy. They had dealt with this situation quite a few times.

However, Aperture had no choice but to obey Chell's mother, due to that very same valiant employee, who exposed his identity as an undercover OSHA investigator later that day. He agreed to forfeit his assignment and not report Aperture's numerous, and very egregiously inadequate health and safety conditions to OSHA, on the condition that the mother's dying wish be honored.

Unfortunately, he trusted Aperture to take care of the actual placement arrangements. Which they did take care of, by placing her as a ward in an unused stasis chamber in their least dangerous wing. Aperture was far more secretive and paranoid than any company in existance today, and, after observing her Child Care center tapes, they were certain that this precocious child knew exactly the terms on which her mother had died.

Although she couldn't remember it, it was just five years ago that Chell had been sitting next to her mother in a flourescently-lit waiting room. She was wearing a faded blue dress, both her white tights and sneakers stained and tattered by overuse. Her feet swung back and forth over a far-away floor, and Chell stared as the yellowed sneakers disappeared and reappeared from under the seat, the ends of her untied shoelaces clicking against the metal supports. She was bored. They'd been waiting for hours in this office, where there was nothing to read, or play with, or even look at. So she watched her shoes.

A choking snuffle sounded near her right and she and let her feet swing gently a few more times before they came to a rest, and turned to look at her mother.

She was surprisingly beautiful woman. Windowless factories, foggy docking yards, and her tiny, crumbling tenament prevented the sun's rays from touching her very often, but still her browned skin and ruddy cheecks blazoned against the dull, listeless, black eyes that now surveyed the paper with confusion and trepidation. They had once been bright, but no one still alive could admit to having witnessed them in that state.

Chell watched a tear fall onto the phonebook of a contract her mother was leafing through. Some typewriter ink smeared as the woman clumsily tried to wipe the droplet away from a large, boldened X. After staring for a time at the line that stemmed from this X, she took a deep breath and raised her wet face to Chell, who had long been watching.

"Oh, Chell..." She crooned, wrapping a strong arm around her daughter's shoulders and pulling her close. Chell wrapped her own arms around her mother's waist and, feeling a sudden urgency, held fast as long as she could until her mother's sad face reappeared in front of her own. Chell felt the brush of familiar callouses against her forehead as her mother tucked a strand of tangled, brown hair behind her ear, then kissed her brow, leaving the traces of a few wet tears.

"My little lamb..." She held her for a few more moments, suspended in deep thought.

Releasing her daughter reluctantly, she picked up a small white pen with a logo on it from the metal table at her side and slowly inscribed her name in clumsy strokes next to the smeared, boldened X. Desperate to prevent herself from changing her mind, she stood , flipped the enormous stack of papers to its front cover and closed it resolutely. Chell made out a printed graphic on the front- what looked like a series of tilted rombuses arranged in a circle, closing in on an invisible point at the center. The name Aperture Science was stamped above a smaller title that read "Aperture Laboratories Test Subject Indemnity Agreement, Non-Disclosure Agreement, et. al." Chell blinked confusedly at these phrases.

She turned her watchful eyes back to her mother, who looked at Chell wanly, holding out her hand. Tanking it, she wove her fingers between her mothers', staying close as they approached what looked like a ticket booth. Her mother slid the stack of paper through an opening under the plexiglass. A young clerk with auburn hair and too much lipstick snatched it away quickly and filed the forms somewhere in the darker room behind the glass. Chell stood on the toes of her sneakers and tried to peer through it, but the stinging flourescent lights in the waiting room glared the barrier. Without looking at either of them, the clerk sat down heavily at her desk and declared, "Through that door on the right, ma'am." She went back to her magazine. They both still stood there.

After a few silent seconds, Chell's mother cleared her throat pointedly. The clerk's eyes flashed up with an equally pointed glare. "May I help you?"

"Do I come back here after the tests?" She asked, fidgeting with her broken fingernails. "To collect my payment?"

For a second it almost appeared as if the clerk were about to laugh aloud, but within an instant she cleared her face, though the shadow of a disdainful smirk lingered. With a blank, enigmatic countenance, she gave the woman her instructions.

"You just keep going where those researchers tell you to, ma'am, and that's all I can honestly tell you." She leaned back in her chair and blocked her pale face with the magazine, continuing the article. "The emancipation grid leading to the Subject Lobby is through that door." Her pointed red fingernails gleamed as she motioned lazily to a white cement door set against the rough cinderblock walls.

Chell's mother lead Chell to the white door. Her worn joints cracked as she kneeled down to face her daugher, taking her hands. "Don't worry, lamb. I'll be back in no time, and then we can get something real good to eat." She forced a jocular smile onto her worn face. "What's your favorite food again, little lamb? I swear I forgot."

Chell flashed a short lived smile, but continued watching her own hands. They looked so small in her mothers'.

The woman leaned in and cradled her daughter's head against her shoulder. "Chelly girl, when I get back, we'll go to the bakery and buy all the cake you want. And I'll specifically tell him to make it with extra fudge icing. How 'bout that, huh?"

Chell nodded and closed her eyes at the stinging of new tears. She unlaced her hands from her mothers' and threw her bony arms tightly around the woman's shoulders.

The clerk's face appeared once again from her shroud of lassitude, and she watched this exchange for a short while. She's wrapping herself around her mother like a fishing net, she thought. Trying to catch and keep her forever like a golsfish at the carnival.

Licking her thumb and turning the page, the clerk observed that it was as if the girl knew she would never get to do it again.

A few weeks after she was informed that her 10th calendar birthday had passed, she was allowed to participate in the company Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. However, she was warned sternly, and reminded many times, that she was not to talk to anyone. Having never seen other children her whole life, she flew into excitement at the prospect of creating the most advanced project any of them had ever beheld. Sneaking around her well-known passageways, crevices, and corridors, Chell collected the ingredients for what she had read of and studied many times over in disused textbooks- Aperture Industry's Inorganic Growth Supplement: For Organisms of All Types. Applying it liberally to her provided Aperture Brand Potato, she set about constructing her display in the Enrichment Center classroom.

As the first diurnal-signaling readers in her room began to grow bright, Chell awoke to an air of intense animation, noting a spreading, prickly tingling throughout her body. She simply attributed to her profound excitement. The next hour saw her tending to her project and standing next to it proudly, if a little unstably, in her baggy orange test jumpsuit. Her clothes always two or three sizes too big. Very few of the employees knew name, let alone clothing size.

The other employees' children soon arrived and began setting up their own potato battery displays. Chell's astute eyes sparkled as she noted the remarkable growth in her plant from minute to minute, and it was not long before all the rest of the children and some of their parents had arrived and thronged at her poster board, marveling at the towering tendrils that were arching toward the ceiling before their very eyes. Ebullient in the rays of their admiration, she could even swear she felt as if she were literally swelling with pride before them, just like her potato. The children showered her with questions, praise, and the occasional accusation of cheating, but not wanting to ruin her chance at the only social event she'd yet experienced, she only nodded and smiled in answer.

After pointing out the special paste she had applied to the potato, a girl at the front with black hair and freckles straightened with indignation and denounced her project.

"You're a cheat! I've never even see you in my life, and my dad practically runs this lab! What are you, a lab rat? Let me see what this 'special fertilizer' of yours is, chea-"

She was cut short as her hand, reaching out to grab the house-plant sized sprout, was slapped away by an stout scientist with slicked back hair who Chell recognized as Dr. Onack, the Deputy Director of Mutagenics, the place she most often visited during the night. He always carelessly left doors to the equipment and storage rooms unlocked, something Chell appreciated deeply. He was clearly alarmed.

"Macy, don't you dare touch that! If that's what I think it is..."

He turned to look not so much down, anymore, but at eye level with a 5'4" Chell, who was almost imperceptibly growing taller as the crowd of confused children was hurriedly rushed from the classroom by a lab technician, who screeched down the corridor for a Dr. Maywell. The entire Mutagenics lab soon flooded into the classroom, fighting to get a look, and then gasping at Chell. Some hurried to observe the potato belonging to her project. A few simply stared at her with resigned disbelief. Eventually, an older woman wearing bifocals shoved her way to the front of the throng. Her heeled clacked on the floor and came to an stop in front of the project, some grey ringlets escaping from her bun as she squinted intently at and the spud, adjusting her glasses every so often.

After careful and silent investigation, Dr. Maywell straightened and announced angrily that it was the old potato miracle grow supplement her team at Botany had developed in the 1960's. She explained that, though highly effective, it had been scrapped for its fearful ecological impacts, which included an unprecedented surge in long-extinct flatworms, early horses, and primitive dinosaurs, as well as it being too voltile and costly to ship. Coming to her conclusion of its history, the fuming scientist approached Chell.

"Just where the hell did you get the chemicals and equipment to make this?" She motioned to the plant, awaiting an explanation.

Instead, Chell stared down at her hands. They looked enormous.

"Do you have any idea what you've done? If one of those children had actually touched that material, it would have cost our department millions of dollars to cover something like that up! Now we have to place all of them in indefinite quarantine; I can't even give an estimate on how much of our funds that testing will dry up."

She began pacing, her hands clasped behind her back. "I knew this was a mistake from the beginning. I don't care how much of a bonus I get, accepting you as a ward at my lab was the biggest professional mistake I've made yet." She continued, eyes flashing with malice. " And you know what? In all likely hood, you're going to die of progeria in a few months. Truly, even if..."

She cut herself short. Dr. Maywell was still furious, of course, but she stopped her pacing and seemed to consider for a second, before continuing again. Pivoting to Chell, she spoke:

"But then again... if you remain alive and in my... 'care'..." Here she unclasped her hands to create air quotes. "I still get my bonus, and if everything goes accordingly, you don't get to screw around in my department anymore, either." She gave a bitter smirk. "Now, doesn't that sound like a plan, Chell?"

Turning to her employees, she directed members the staff to grab the HEV suits from the lab and direct the children the the quarantine center. "Nobody touch that blasted overgrown potato, or the other projects, until I say so myself. Marn and Liechman, go to her living quarters and put all the sensors in her room on 'Average Conscious Cycle'. Not that anyone's going to check on her anyway. And Aminabad, get me a 110 cc shot of 8G0 Inhibitor, the concetrated form. The rest of you, back to your stations."

She waited until the rest had left to close the door to address her lead researcher.

"Onack, we're sending her to one of the small pod-style short-term stasis chambers. The company hardly ever uses them anymore, so reserve one in the corner of sector 7-L for private use. We'll just need to go down to conduct the annual fingprinting certification records Security set up for the lower-level employees." She let out a laugh just like a spark. It filled the room with noise, burst, and disappeared just as quickly. "You can be sure that no one will even notice she's down there until we're long retired."

During this exchange, Chell had been formulating a way out of the classroom, this test, and had by now devised a plan. It was plausible, she wagered. As long as she could pull off the acrobatics. Dr. Maywell, who had just turned to address her ward, shrieked as Chell lunged toward the desk holding her potato battery project. But, not knowing her own body anymore, tripped over her seemingly gargantuan feet and fell hard on her shoulder. The orange jumpsuit was by no means baggy anymore; it ripped along both newly elongated arms, her suddenly lengthnened legs, and halfway down the length of her spine, which she could almost feel growing, as slowly as it was.

Struggling to gain control of her unweildly body, she made another move for the project. Her fingertips brushed the anode of the battery, but she was shoved aside by Dr. Onack.

Chell fell sideways into the transparent wall surrounding the classroom and hit the plexiglass with her new bones. Her collarbone snapped sharply against her weight; with a great gasp she cradled the injury as she sunk down onto the tiles. Her knees hit the floor with a terrible sound- they twisted and shattered on impact, knocking her into a state of shock. She closed her eyes against the flourescent lights, which suddenly burned as intensely as her contorted knees.

Having no control of her muscles anymore, Chell began to fall backwards. As the ceiling grew father and farther away from her, a surprisingly agile Dr. Maywell caught her head and rested it in her worn palms a few inches above the floor. Chell listened with a fading consciousness, dying of agony, not knowing her own body anymore, and not even sure if she wanted to hear of her fate.

"Now, Dr. Onack. These are brand new structures, like those of an infant, yet even more hurriedly made. Be careful, we don't want to forfeit that generous grant bonus, not to mention the Cause of Death paperwork we'd have to fill out. She's technically listed as a part-time employee, you know. Just call in a stretcher and have her sent to Exploratory Anatomy, I'm sure they can do something about these injuries."

"It looks like she'll need some new knees..." Said Onack, with a grimace in his voice.

"Yes. And I want you to personally keep tabs on her while she's there... I don't want anyone knowing she isn't just some ambitious 20-something test subject who suffered a bit of a fall. Do you understand me?"

"Yes Dr. Maywell..." The searing lights overhead were starting to blur across Chell's vision. She blinked and tried to move her left foot out from under her; it sapped her strength. The conversation faded in and out of her head like the old radio in her dormitory. Everything was going.

"...Once she's done in there, place her in the specified pod. The stasis age suspension should halt the rapid aging permanently within a few hours, but I'm giving her something now that will slow it, so the lab boys at Ex Anatomy don't note anything unusual about this particular test subject... other then her particularly brittle bones." The door squeaked open and a dark, far away figure handed a hypodermic needle to Dr. Onack. He prepared to administer the shot as Dr. Maywell rolled up the scratchy sleeve of Chell's jumpsuit. "At any rate, that type of malnutrition is not uncommon among the destitutes who apply for these death-traps..."

The muddled, swarming voice of the doctor was the last thing Chell heard as an ice-cold needle dove into her vein and dropped her into age-long sleep. She regretted listening. It was a bleak fate.


End file.
